Rules of Prey

by John Sandford

  He lay back again, his head propped up on a pillow, took a sip of beer, held the can on his chest, and read through the lists again.

  Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Cop.

  He glanced at his watch. Nine-forty-five. He got off the bed, the beer still in his hand, walked back to the workroom, and picked up the telephone. After a moment's hesitation he punched in the number for Channel Eight.

  "Tell her it's Red Horse," he said. McGowan was on the line fifteen seconds later.

  "Red Horse?"

  "Yeah. Listen, Annie, this is exclusive. There was a witness on the street near the Brown killing. He actually saw the maddog. Says he looked like a farmer. He was wearing one of those hats with the bills on them, like seed hats? So it's possible that he's driving in from the countryside."

  "A commuter killer?"

  "Yeah, you could say that."

  "Like he commutes to the Twin Cities to murder these women, then goes back home, where he's just another farmer picking potatoes or whatever?"

  "Well, uh, we think maybe he's a pig farmer. This guy, the witness, brushed past him, wondered what this farmer-looking dude was doing with a chick like Brown. Anyway, he said there was a kind of odor hanging about him, you know?"

  "You mean... pig shit?"

  "Uh, pig manure, yes. That kind of confirms what we thought before."

  "That's good, Red Horse. Is there any chance we can get this guy on camera?"

  "No. No chance. If something happens to change that, we'll let you know, but we're keeping his identity a secret for now. If the maddog found out who he is, he might go after him."

  "Okay. Let me know if that changes. Anything else?"

  "No. That's it."

  "Thanks, Red Horse. I mean, I really, really appreciate this."

  There was a moment of silence, of pressure. Lucas fought it.

  "Uh, yeah," he said. "See you."

  CHAPTER

  16

  A pig farmer?

  The maddog raged through his apartment. They said he was a pig farmer. They said he smelled like pig shit.

  He had trouble focusing.

  The real issue. He had to remember the real issue: somebody had seen him and remembered the way he dressed. Had they seen his face? Was an artist working on circulars? Would they be plastered around the courthouse in the morning? He gnawed on a thumbnail, pacing. Pain flashed through his hand. He looked down and found he had ripped a chunk of nail out, peeling it away from the lobster-pink underskin. Blood surged into the tear. Cursing, he stumbled to the bathroom, found a clipper, tried to trim the nail, his hand shaking. When it was done, his thumb still throbbing, he wrapped it with a plastic bandage and went back to the television.

  Sports. He ran the videotape back and watched Annie McGowan deliver her scoop. Pig farmer, she said. Commuter killer. Smells of pig manure, may explain his inability to attract women. He punched the sound and watched only the picture, her black hair with the bangs curled over her forehead, her deep, dark eyes.

  Now she stirred him. She looked like... who? Somebody a long time ago. He stopped the tape, rewound it, ran it again, with the sound muted. She was Chosen.

  ***

  McGowan.

  Research would be needed, but he had time. She was a good choice for several reasons. She would be satisfying; and she would teach a lesson. He was not One to laugh at. He was not One to be called a pig farmer. The Cities would be horrified; nobody would laugh. They would know the power. Everybody: they would know it. He paced rapidly, circling the living room, watching McGowan's face, running the tape back, watching again. A fantasy. A lesson.

  ***

  A lesson for later. There was another Chosen. She moved through his sleep and his waking vision. She moved; she did not walk. She lived less than two long blocks from the maddog. He had seen her several times, rolling down the sidewalk in her wheelchair. An auto accident, he learned. She was an undergraduate at the university when it happened. She had been streaking through the night with a fraternity boy in his overpowered sports car. His neck snapped with the impact when they hit the overpass abutment, her back was shattered by a seat frame. Took an hour to get her out of the car. Both newspapers reported the accident.

  But she came back, and both newspapers did feature stories about her return.

  Graduated from the school of business, started law. A woman in law; they were all over the place now. She had a backpack hung from the side of her machine to carry her books. She rolled the chair with her own arms, so she'd be strong. Lived by herself in an apartment on the back of a crumbling house six blocks from the law school.

  The maddog had already scouted the apartment. It was owned by an old woman, a widow, who lived in the front with a half-dozen calico cats. A student couple lived upstairs. The cripple lived in back. A ground-level ramp allowed her to roll right into the kitchen of the three-room unit. The news clips said she valued her singleness, her independence. She wore a steel ring on a chain around her neck; it had belonged to the boy killed in the wreck. She said she had to live for both of them now. More clips.

  The maddog had done his research in the library, finding her name in the indexes, reading the stories on microfilm. In the end, he was certain. She was Chosen.

  If he had the chance to take her. But he had been seen. Recognized. What would the morning bring? He paced for an hour, round and round the apartment, then threw on a coat and walked outside. Cold. A hard frost for sure. Winter coming.

  He walked down the block, down the next, past the cripple's house. The upper apartment was lit up. The lower one, the old lady's, was dark. He continued past and looked back at the side of the house; the cripple's window was also dark. He glanced at his watch. One o'clock. She was top of the class, the news clips said. He licked his lips, felt the sting of the wind against his wet mouth. He needed her. He really did.

  ***

  He continued his walk, across the street, down another block, and another. The vision of the cripple rolling through his mind. He had been seen. Would his face be in the papers the next day? Would the police get a call? Might they be getting a call now? They could be driving to his apartment now, looking for him. He shivered, walked. The cripple floated up again. Sometime later, he found himself standing in front of a university dormitory. A new building, red brick. There was a phone inside. Davenport.

  The maddog walked into the dormitory in a virtual trance. A blonde coed in a white ski-team sweatshirt glanced at him as she went through the door into the inner lobby, past the check-in desk. The phone was mounted on a wall opposite the rest rooms. He pressed his forehead against the cool brick. He shouldn't do it. He groped in his pocket for a quarter.

  "Hello?"

  "Davenport?" He sensed a sudden tension on the other end.

  "Yeah."

  "What is this game? What is this pig thing?"

  "Ah, could you-?"

  "You know who this is; and let me warn you. I've chosen the next one. And when you play games, you anger the One; and the Chosen will pay. I'm going to go look at her now. I'm that close. I am looking." The words, in his own ears, sounded pleasantly formal. Dignified.

  He dropped the receiver back on the hook and walked back through the empty outer lobby, pushed through the glass doors. Pig farmer. His eyes teared and he bent his head and trudged toward home.

  The walk was lost in alternating visions of the Chosen and McGowan and quick cuts of Davenport in the clerk's office, his face turning toward him, looking at him. The maddog paid no attention to where he was going, until he unexpectedly found himself standing outside his apartment. His feet had found their own way; it was like waking from a dream. He went in, began to take off his coat, hesitated, picked up the phone book, found the number, and dialed the Star-Tribune.

  "City desk." The voice was gruff, hurried.

  "When do the papers come out?"

  "Should be on the street now. Anytime."

  "Thanks." The phone on
the other end hit the hook before the word was fully out of his mouth.

  The maddog went out to his car, started it, drove across the Washington Street bridge into the downtown. There were two green newspaper boxes outside the Star-Tribune building. He pulled over, deposited his quarters, and looked at the front page: MADDOG A HOG FARMER? TV STORY SAYS "YES."

  The story was taken directly from McGowan's news broadcast. A brief telephone interview with the chief of police was appended: "I don't know where she got the information, but I don't know anything about it," Daniel said. He did not, however, deny the possibility that the killer was a farmer. "Anything is possible at this point," he added.

  There was no sketch. There was no description.

  He went back to his car, sat in the driver's seat, and paged quickly through the paper. There was another story about the killings on page three, comparing them to a similar string of killings in Utah. Nothing more. He turned back to the front page.

  Hog farmer, it said.

  He would not permit it.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Daniel leaned far back in his chair, the eraser end of a yellow pencil pressed against his lower teeth, watching Sloan. Anderson and Lester slumped in adjacent chairs. Lucas paced.

  "What you're saying is, we got nothing," Daniel said when the detective finished.

  "Nothing we can use to bag the guy," Sloan said. "When we find him, we've got information we can use to pin him down. We could even run him by Jefferson Sparks, see if he rings a bell. But we don't have anything to point at him."

  "What about driver's licenses? Did we get that?"

  Anderson shook his head. "They don't track incoming state licenses by individual names."

  Lucas paced at the perimeter of the room. "What about those post offices?"

  "We're getting some returns. Too many of them. We've had a hundred and thirty-six moves so far, covering the past two years, and we've only heard from post offices covering maybe a tenth of the population we're looking at. If that rate holds up, we'll get about fourteen hundred names. We're also finding out that the most likely moves are young single males. Probably a third of them in that category. That's something like five hundred suspects. And all of it rests on the idea that the guy's maybe got an accent."

  "And if he moved here three years ago, instead of in the last two, we're fucked anyway," said Daniel.

  "But it's something," Lucas insisted. "How many of the ones that you have so far are single males? Assuming that's what we want to look at?"

  "Thirty-eight of the hundred and thirty-six. But some of those apparently moved here with women or moved in with a woman after they got here, or are old. We've had a couple of guys doing a quick scan of the names, and there are about twenty-two that fit all the basic criteria: young, single, male, unattached."

  "White-collar?" asked Lucas.

  "All but two. People don't move here for blue-collar jobs. There are more jobs in Texas, and less cold," Anderson said.

  "So what are we talking about?" Daniel asked.

  "Well, we're talking about checking these twenty-two. We should be able to eliminate half or better, just walking around. Then we'll focus tighter on the rest of them. 'Course, we'll have new names coming in all the time."

  "Lucas? Anything else?"

  Lucas took another turn at the back of the room. He had talked to Daniel the night before about the phone call from the maddog, and told the others at the start of the meeting. He'd taped the call. He was taping all calls now. First thing in the morning, he'd taken a copy of the tape to the university and tracked down a couple of linguists to listen to it.

  They had called Daniel during the meeting: Texas, one of them said. The other was not quite so certain. Texas, or some other limited sections of the Southwest. The eastern corner of New Mexico, maybe, around White Sands. Oklahoma and Arkansas were out.

  "His accent has a strong overlay of the Midwest," the second linguist said. "There's this one line, 'I'm going to go look at her now.' If you listen closely, break it down, what he really says is 'I'm-unna go look at her now.' That's a midwesternism. Upper Midwest, north central. So I think he's been here awhile. Not so long that he's completely lost his southwestern accent, but long enough to get an overlay."

  "Ah," Lucas said. The detectives were looking at him curiously. "Last night, I was watching Channel Eight. McGowan comes on and she has this piece about the pig farmer. So the maddog calls forty-five minutes later. I checked with the Pioneer Press and the Star-Tribune to see what time the first editions came out-they both carried follows on the McGowan story. None of them were out when the maddog called."

  "So he saw it on TV," Anderson said.

  "And I've been thinking about McGowan," Lucas said. "She fits the type the maddog's been going after..."

  "Ah, Jesus Christ," Daniel blurted.

  "There was something about that call. There's something special about this 'chosen' one he talks about. I feel it."

  "You think he might go after McGowan?"

  "He's watching her on TV. And physically, she fits his type. And she's had all these weird stories. The guy seems to want the attention, but from his point of view, everything she's been saying is negative. He talks about being the 'one' and she says he's impotent and smells bad and farms pigs. Last night, he was pissed."

  "That's it," Daniel said, his face flushed. "I want a watch on McGowan, twenty-four hours."

  "Jesus, chief-" Anderson started.

  "I don't care how many guys it takes. Break some of them out of uniform if you have to. I want guys on her during the day and I want a watch on her house at night."

  "But delicately," Lucas said.

  "What?"

  "She's our chance to grab him," Lucas said. He put up his hands to stop interruptions. "I know, I know, we've got to be careful. Not take any chances with her. I know all that. But she might be our best shot."

  "If you're right, he might be looking at her right now," Lester said. "Right this minute."

  "I don't think he'll try during the day. She's always around people. If he tries, it'll be at night. When she's on her way home or at her home. He could break into her house during the day and wait for her. We should cover that possibility."

  "You've thought about this," Daniel said, his eyes narrowing.

  Lucas shrugged. "Yeah. Maybe I've got my head up my ass. But it seems like a chance, just like when you put a watch on me."

  "Okay," Daniel said. He turned and pressed an intercom lever. "Linda, call Channel Eight and tell them I want to talk to the station manager urgently." He let the intercom go and said, "Lucas, stay a minute. Everybody else, let's get going on the basics. Start processing the list of guys who moved in. It won't do any good if he's really been here for a while, but we've got to check. Anderson, I want you to go back over every note we've got, see if we're missing anything we should have covered."

  As the others drifted out of the room, Lucas slouched against a wall, staring at the rug.

  "What?" Daniel said.

  "This guy is nuts in a different way than I thought. He's not a straight, cold killer. There's something else wrong with his head. The way he was talking about the 'one' and the 'chosen.'"

  "What difference does it make?"

  "I don't know. Could make it harder to outguess him. He might not react like we expect him to."

  "Whatever," Daniel said dismissively. "I wanted to ask you about something else. Where is McGowan getting this crap she's putting on the air?"

  Lucas shook his head. "Probably a uniform who's just close enough to the investigation to pick up some stuff, but not close enough to get it right."

  "So you're in Cedar Rapids yesterday and it's the first time anybody said the word 'farmer' in the whole investigation. The next thing I know, she's on the air saying the maddog is a farmer."

  "Saying pig farmer. There's a difference. Whoever's feeding her is cutting the killer up. Sparks doesn't even think the maddog is a farmer. I don't either.
I stopped on the way back and called in what Sparks said, so Anderson could get it in the data base. After that? Who knows. There's a leak, but it's all twisted up."

  "Okay," said Daniel. He was suspicious, Lucas thought. More than suspicious. He knew, and was talking for the record. "I'm not going to ask you anything else about this coincidence. But I would remark that if somebody is playing a game, it could be a dangerous one."

  "We're already playing a dangerous game," Lucas said. "The maddog's not giving us any choice."